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Mental Floss
Tom Pennington/ The National Flag Code was adopted on June 14, 1923, by the National Flag Conference. The representatives from the U.S. Army and Navy and more than 60 other organizations in attendance were charged with examining the rules and procedures
Jamie Spatola|
Scientists have a sense of humor just like the rest of us. The difference is that a scientist's jokes are sometimes enshrined in the body of knowledge for eternity, or close to it. One of the ways they do this is naming things that previously had no name,
Miss Cellania|
Picture an atom. Now picture that atom getting excited. Maybe its birthday is coming up. Anyway, when an atom or a molecule gets excited, its electrons' energy levels go up. When the electrons fall back down to their normal state, they release energy in t
Matt Soniak|
When an Apple programmer’s project got canceled, he didn’t despair. He just kept sneaking into the office until the program was finished.
the mag|
Reader Brit asks: "Is there any rhyme or reason to calling a road an avenue, a boulevard, a street or a lane? Is it just at the discretion of whoever names the
Matt Soniak|
The characteristic green tint is by design, for a few reasons. First, device makers have experimented with a few different colors and found that the different shades that make up the monochrome night vision image are most accurately perceived and distingu
Matt Soniak|
Pretty much ever since humans discovered flight, we’ve been strapping animals into our new devices just to see what would happen. Over the last 330 years or so, we’ve launched dogs, cats, chimps, monkeys, roosters, ducks, spiders, fruit flies, silk worms
Haley Sweetland Edwards|
Everyone knows that Stephen King was a janitor and Ransom Riggs shared creepy old photos on mentalfloss.com. What did some other famous writers do before their big breaks?
Adrienne Crezo|
Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos means "whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to Heaven and down to Hell."
Matt Soniak|
In the early 1880s, Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck of Germany had a problem. Marxist unrest was spreading across Europe and some of his own countrymen were calling for socialist reforms. To take the wind out of their sails and stave off more radical policie
Matt Soniak|
Installment #23: In the 19th century, European statesmen came to share an amoral (some would say cynical) view of geopolitics, in which international relations were based solely on the size and strength of rival players and their perceived self-interest,
Erik Sass|
RAY STUBBLEBINE/Reuters/Landov New York Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey, the only active major leaguer who throws a knuckleball, hasn’t allowed an earned run in 42 2/3 innings and recently became the first pitcher since 1988 to throw back-to-back one-hitters. T
Scott Allen|
Over seven seasons, the General Lee went airborne more than 150 times. Although it seemed fine on screen, the General rarely survived a jump. Warner Brothers totaled an average of two Chargers per episode.
Lucas Reilly|
Image: Hemera | Thinkstock The media has become obsessed with the so-called “Miami Zombie” case, and for good reason. It sounds like something ripped straight out of a horror movie and brought to life. But these kinds of things seem to occur with a prett
M Asher Cantrell|
If the air and the water are the same temperature, what accounts for the difference that we perceive? It's a matter of heat transfer, the transition of thermal energy from a hotter object to a cooler object.
Matt Soniak|
If you like sampling new beers or hate having money, you might want to try one of these budget-busting brews.
Lucas Reilly|
CBS/Landov Once upon a time, magazine publishers hired teams of commissioned salesmen that went door-to-door to drum up new subscriptions. It was a pretty inefficient way to sell magazines. So in 1953 Harold Mertz, the manager of a magazine sales team, ca
Rob Lammle|
Tomatoes image via Shutterstock If you take a bunch of very smart, passionate science geeks, deprive them of sleep, fill them with booze, and put them in a room together, the conversations can take some pretty wild turns. That's what happened earlier thi
Matt Soniak|
If you’re a member of my generation or the one that raised it, your house was probably full of all sorts of glow-in-the-dark stuff in the 80s and 90s. Yo-yo's, stickers, action figures, clothing, you name it. As a kid, I thought it was just short of magic
Matt Soniak|
Installment #22: The naval arms race between Britain and Germany (along with smaller naval arms races between other European powers) was precipitated by a new ship, the HMS Dreadnought, which revolutionized naval weaponry. Her size, armor, and firepower e
Erik Sass|
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